About
This website began as a record of what I could not stop thinking about. It continues to serve that purpose.
I am a critic, essayist, and sometime curator, now based between London, Ontario and New Delhi. My doctoral research at the University of Western Ontario examined the aesthetics of migration and belonging, the visual and literary forms through which displaced identity is negotiated, refused, and reimagined, drawing on hospitality theory, postmigrant aesthetics, and postcolonial visual culture. The dissertation is done. The questions it opened are not.
My intellectual formation is curatorial before it is academic. I came to theory through objects, through the problem of what art does to a room and to the person standing in it. This has made me a critic who thinks in surfaces, not because surfaces are shallow, but because they are where meaning becomes legible, and where it most often exceeds what can be said about it in plain prose.
On this site I write about cinema, literature, and aesthetics with whatever rigor and honesty I can bring to the page. I also write about fountain pens, football, film photography, and the small material arrangements of a life. I do not consider these categories separate. Attention is a practice, and it does not divide itself neatly by subject.
The site's tagline, a desultory cache of chronicles, is accurate in spirit if not in ambition. What accumulates here is not a system but a sensibility: a record of what it looks like to read, watch, and move through the world with sustained curiosity and insufficient certainty.
I can be reached at kbarua2(at)uwo(dot)ca
Updated on: 08.02.2026